I am taking a risk by embarking on this series and I know it. As usual, that means I am going to do it anyway. This has often been my approach to life and it’s how I got the first-hand education on possession and negative entities in the first place. That story may come in time but for the record, I don’t recommend my approach. There was a big price tag that came with this education and I’m not talking student loans. No, I have paid for this education in the form of trauma to myself and my family and I probably wouldn’t make the same choices again. On the other hand, this has become incredibly useful information that I rely on to help others in the healing sessions that I hold. And even within the modality of Internal Family Systems, in which I am trained, there is language and acknowledgment of this kind of thing.
But let’s start at the very beginning, with the very first question I’m sure is on your mind:
What is an entity?
If you Google this, you will be presented with a series of benign links that won’t answer your question from a spiritual perspective. Yes, the usual definition of this word is often used from a business or legal perspective. But the definition (via Oxford Languages) works in the way I am using it, too:
en·ti·ty
noun: entity; plural noun: entities
a thing with distinct and independent existence.
"Church and empire were fused in a single entity"
existence; being.
"entity and nonentity"
For our purposes, here’s how I define an entity: An entity is a living, intelligent being that has a distinct and separate existence from the rest of you and has a harmful effect.
If that made you shudder, you’re not alone. There is so much fear and misunderstanding about entities and my purpose here is to help with that. I find that education and understanding are foremost tools in dispelling fear, by which I mean we will undo the spell that fear casts over our senses and start to see things as they truly are.
I find that entities are different than spirits, which are often benign and simply looking for acknowledgment, though there can be some crossover in how certain spirits and entities behave. I want to begin by telling you about my first encounter with some “sticky” spirit energy that began to open my eyes and call me to my work.
Way back in 2011, my now-husband and I took a trip to London, Paris, Cannes, and Monaco. It was a trip of a lifetime and included many amazing moments that I experienced with delight, like staying in the private villa of a dear friend in Cannes or climbing to the top of Notre Dame just in time to hear the bells chime. One of the stops I wanted to do was to visit the famous catacombs in Paris, which is an underground ossuary with many thousands of bones stacked in macabre displays.
To this day, I can’t explain why I felt so drawn to that experience. I wasn’t aware of my spiritual gifts back then the way I am now and I typically wrote off my uncanny “knowings” or gave all the credit to “the Universe.” My husband is notoriously claustrophobic, so I descended into the ossuary solo, accompanied by a small group of other tourists. As I walked under the ominous stone passageway that stated in part, “C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE MORT (This is the Realm of The Dead),” I felt a sense of unease that continued to rise within me. I brushed it off as silly superstition and fear because, well, it was dark and I was surrounded by thousands of bones and who wouldn’t be a little unnerved by that. The sensation did not subside and I began to feel distinctly unwelcome, with a particular hostility directed towards all of us who were touring. I remember thinking to myself, wow, I really don’t think the Dead are happy here. They had, after all, been disinterred from their graves and thrown into a jumble, then their coffins were ransacked and burned, their bones stacked in displays so that tickets could be sold to view them. As I walked past stacks of artfully arranged skulls and femurs, the sentiment became a single word: NON! And the French word for “no” rattled inside me for the rest of the tour.
I didn’t realize I was so affected until I emerged on the other side. My husband met up with me in the gift shop and his eyes grew wide. “Are you ok,” he said, “because you look as white as a sheet!”
As it turned out, I wasn’t ok. I felt nauseated and weak. I needed to eat immediately. I got lunch and we returned to our rental so I could nap. I didn’t feel like myself until later that night, after some strong cognac and black tea. We wondered about it but the vacation continued and we flew home without incident.
As the jet lag wore off, I noticed I didn’t feel alone in my home. Late at night, after Jim went to bed, the shadows seemed odd. Dismissing my experience as paranoia and silliness, I continually bypassed the nagging feeling I had. And then I began to see things. Every time I closed my eyes, the same vision would play, again and again. A shrieking old woman, furious with rage, would swoop towards my face as her body crumbled into dusty bones. It began to happen nightly and my own willpower was not enough to dismiss it. Even if I hid under the covers like a little kid, nearly every time I closed my eyes I saw the same thing until I fell asleep.
Eventually, I got the idea that maybe I should ask a question of myself and I-don’t-know-what and see what happened. Was it a ghost? Was I haunted? Was I losing my mind completely? Should I tell someone? Should I call the Ghostbusters? I felt something between despair and growing insanity. What was happening to me? The answers came, as swiftly as I asked them. This is a spirit from the Paris Catacombs. You were such a bright light that she stuck onto you and won’t leave until you send her away. She’s feeding on your fear and that’s why the experience is getting worse. You can do this.
I was shocked. Grasping at straws, I thought about what exorcisms in the movies looked like and I thought about my childhood spent in the church, where I heard about the power of Jesus up to three times a week and twice on Sunday. Unsure of what else to do, I reached out to my old understanding of Jesus and asked for help. Immediately, my whole system and everything in sight was blasted with light and heat. It was over in mere seconds and I sat in stunned silence, finally alone. The nasty spirit energy was gone for good, I just knew it, and I slept well. That was the end of that experience, though it was several years until I told the story to anyone else and even more before I understood it fully.
My understanding of many things has expanded in the 12 years since and only continues. Jesus, who I now call Yeshua, continues to be a trusted companion in my healing sessions, though I don’t always work with him directly and can work with any belief system my client uses, so long as everyone involved supports the Highest Good for All Beings. I’ve worked with many, many beings over the years to help myself and my clients heal, dispose of entities, and renegotiate all kinds of agreements. I’m sure I’ll tell more of those stories in time.
For today, what I want to leave you with is a clear explanation of the story I’ve just told:
An entity is a distinct and separate energy from the rest of you. In my story above, I could clearly feel that the recurring vision was not strictly mine and was not something I was imagining for fun.
An entity is alive and intelligent, though not flesh and blood. There’s a reason that this experience kept happening to me while I was alone at night. I was most likely to be afraid then, which was what it wanted.
An entity will go wherever there’s an opening. They are opportunistic. They seek bright lights and get in wherever there’s an opening. This often looks like an opening in the energy body, which is usually a weak point where we hold shame or false beliefs about ourselves. In my case, this particular thing was attracted to my bright light and knew that I could sense it and the others. This one never got “inside” but lingered around me until forced to leave.
An entity is often feeding on the energy of whomever it’s attached to. This particular thing was feeding on my fear. I never found out the why but I suspect that, as with many like beings, this is a way to grab energy and power to exert more influence.
An entity will usually not leave on its own. Sometimes it will leave when the “host” is depleted or can no longer provide the energy it’s seeking. But more often, it lingers for as long as possible and disrupts the energy, even the physical health, of the person. There’s no amount of energy that will ever be “enough.”
Once located, getting an entity to leave is fairly straightforward but you often will need help. A single little human, operating as a human, is not “big enough” to combat these things. Of course, there’s quite a range of size, resistance, and infestation, too. In this story, this was a fairly small issue. I simply needed to call in a bigger presence or come from a bigger field myself (which I hadn’t yet learned). There are many beings who can assist with this but the main thing is that the afflicted person needs to get in touch with the felt sense of who they are, the ineffable, loving, eternal, cosmically large soul crammed into this tiny, dense body. Entities are, by comparison, much smaller and are unable to “ride along” in that frequency.
I hope this begins to simplify, demystify, and dispel any fear you might be holding about entities. Entities are commonplace and yet benefit from the fear most humans hold about them, so let’s continue to remember who we really are and hold that reality in our minds and hearts. You are so much more than you were told, dear reader.
I’ll be back next time with more information about different kinds of entities and perhaps another story.